Health Should Be a Bigger Focus at the GOP Convention Than It Will Be, Lawmaker Says

Healthcare should be a bigger focus than it likely will be at this week’s Republican National Convention, Rep. Rich McCormick, MD (R-Ga.), told MedPage Today on Monday.

“I’ll be honest with you — I doubt they’re going to talk much about healthcare,” said McCormick, an emergency physician who is attending the convention and spoke from a Milwaukee hotel prior to the event’s official start. “I wish it was the centerpiece of everything we’re talking about.”

For one thing, healthcare “is the biggest spending item we have in government. Last year, it took up 26% of the budget,” he said. “It’s one of the fastest growing inflationary costs for all Americans. We spend about $5 trillion in healthcare every year as Americans … It’s just phenomenal how much healthcare costs right now, and what we’re not getting out of that for the investment.”

McCormick said he was frustrated with the government in general because “nobody ever wants to talk about saving money. We could not lose any of our great healthcare and actually put out more new product” while still reducing costs. “For example, Biden — through bureaucracies and executive privilege — basically cut $300 billion from Medicare this year, and that money went to [electric vehicles] and PBMs [pharmacy benefit managers] and to deal with the immigrants we’ve got here.”

“If Medicare doesn’t need [the money], why are we spending so much on it?” he said. “We’re either stealing from Medicare and people aren’t getting needed services, or we didn’t need it in the first place.” No one in Congress wants to discuss cutting Medicare, though, “because as soon as you do it, they’d be like, ‘Oh, so you hate old people.’ It’s one of the biggest voting blocs in America. That’s why it’s hard to have an honest conversation about this stuff.”

Abortion is one healthcare topic that receives prominent mention in the Republican platform, with the Republican Party pledging to protect and defend states’ rights on the “issue of life,” citing the 14th Amendment’s “due process” clause. The platform stresses the party’s opposition to late-term abortions, “while supporting mothers and policies that advance prenatal care, access to birth control, and [in vitro fertilization].”

“Unfortunately, I don’t see that message changing” on that topic generally, McCormick said, adding that there is a lot of “dishonest conversation” on the subject because each side tries to paint the other as extremist. “Democrat or Republican, nobody is saying that women can’t have a medical emergency covered, whether it be because of a tubal pregnancy [or something else] … No Republican says you can’t have an abortion even if [staying pregnant] threatens the mother’s life. We all agree on that.”

“I think most people believe that the day-after pill should remain legal, and I think most people believe third-trimester abortions should be illegal,” he said. “That leaves all the stuff in the middle that we should be talking about, but we talk extremes because both parties don’t want to talk about what we agree on. They only want to talk about the absolutes. I wish we’d have more conversations about what we do agree on, and then make those laws.”

Asked whether he thought the topic of gun violence and gun control might come up during the convention given the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump on Saturday, McCormick expressed disappointment that few people discuss the fact that gun violence is a mental health issue rather than an issue of restricting firearms.

“People who are mentally unstable are the ones that are doing the mass shooting,” he said. “If you think about how guns are used illegally … You can make all the laws you want to. There are some of the strictest gun laws in the cities that have the worst gun violence, and so I don’t see laws [as a solution] because people who kill people are breaking laws anyway.”

Also, gun control advocates are focusing on outlawing things like assault rifles “but quite frankly, if you look at the inner-city problems that they have with gang violence, it comes from single-parent households and handguns. But nobody’s trying to outlaw handguns.”

As to other healthcare topics that might be good for discussion — such as changes to the Affordable Care Act or the future of short-term, limited duration health insurance — “the problem is, we’re not having a big, wide-scope focus right now,” said McCormick. “We’re talking about pricing transparency, but we know where the money is going. We’ve seen how the PBMs are vertically integrated. They also have the biggest lobbyists, between the PBMs and insurance companies, the biggest lobbying presence in all of America here in DC.”

He noted that doctors have been getting much bigger pay cuts from the federal government than hospitals. “Why is that? Because they have better lobbyists than we do,” he said. McCormick said he supported permanent fixes to stop annual cuts to Medicare physician payment, as well as implementation of laws requiring site-neutral payment. “That stuff would mean something to me.”

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